March has been somewhat a month of cinema for me. The British Film Institute had some lovely retrospective festivals at the Southbank Centre – including Kubrick and a femme fatale series: more on these films to come. Yet it was my rediscovery of two early 1980s classics by director/producer Steven Spielberg that really started the wheels turning. Thanks to a fantastic sale at HMV and the luck of the draw at a charity shop in Islington, I picked up E.T. and Poltergeist, films I hadn’t seen in ages. Watching them both back to back, I was struck by a subversively dark portrayal of suburban sprawl, long before such descriptions entered our mainstream discourse. What was Spielberg exploring and what implications can we take away in our current state of environmental urgency?
Both E.T. and Poltergeist were Spielberg productions released in 1982, an era that marked the full transition to postmodernity – computers and media as we know it came of age in this era - amidst a rapid political transformation (indeed in Poltergeist one of the protagonists is reading a book on Reagan). Spielberg wrote and produced both films, while he directed only E.T. (though there has been some dispute on this somehow involving contractual obligations, but I digress). In each we have a family with three children, E.T. having a single-parent house and Poltergeist containing the stereotypical nuclear family. Both of these families live in late 1970s homes, which were shot in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley on the edge of the Angeles National Forest. The dichotomy between the natural beauty of the California hills and the sterile repetition of commercial suburbia is a striking motif in both films – it is this mirror image of the natural/manufactured that becomes subversively unnerving.
Each film begins with a depiction of an external force coming into the ‘safe’ and ‘secure’ environment of the suburbs, a lost alien in the case of E.T. and supernatural presence via television in Poltergeist. Once this ‘invasion’ of the Other transpires, each film depicts the sprawling suburbs of Los Angeles with an emphasis on repetition. The home models repeat themselves, there is no evidence of community amenities remotely close by. Thousands of people live in low density housing, yet seem strangely isolated by their bland postmodern homes – Spanish-style architecture dominating in E.T. while the Freeling’s home in Poltergeist is a garish reference to Tudor architecture. In both films, it requires this external force to bring the family closer to each other, and in a skewed sense, closer to their community.
Poltergeist is more direct in its references to the failed suburban dream – the father of the family works for the developer who built the neighbourhood. As the supernatural terror evolves in the story, we learn that the developer is planning to move a cemetery in preparation for his next ‘phase’ of the neighbourhood, Cuesta Verde – which ironically means ‘green hills’ in Spanish. Of course there is nothing green about the hills once homes are built by the hundreds on top of them. This raises the simple question: can the suburbs be green? The films suggests not, as greed led the developer of Cuesta Verde to withhold information from its existing residents about a cemetery move in the past. This avarice is given particular potency when we learn that not only were homes built on the site of an old cemetery, but to save money the developer only moved the headstones and left the bodies in the ground. On one level it is possible to view the supernatural disturbances as the tension between nature and human destruction of the natural. Indeed, we learn in Poltergeist, our present technologies fail in this struggle.
Avoiding the more direct style of horror, Spielberg lends a softer touch to E.T. In the beginning of the film it is suggested that E.T.’s species are botanically inclined as they are foraging the forest floor for specimens to take back to their (rather organic) spaceship. The character of E.T. himself becomes trapped by the social isolation of the suburbs, brilliantly limned in a scene where E.T. wanders the house reacting with curiosity and horror to much of what is on television. Unsurprisingly, E.T. becomes homesick and ill in the sterility of the monotonous suburbs. It seems no accident that a chase fraught with tension occurs amidst new homes under construction, further sterilising the natural beauty of the valley. The return to nature can subversively viewed in the flying bicycle scenes. In both cases, E.T. sends Eliot (and later friends) into the forest, fleeing the jaded superficiality of the suburbs.
Too often film theorists overanalyse movies, which is something I am tediously avoiding. Most of what is suggested above is not likely to be intended by the filmmakers or conscious symbolism. Rather, there are uncanny parallels in the settings and interaction of characters with their environment as a result of an external force of the two films discussed. With such patterns glaringly apparent, it is fair to say that Spielberg paints a fairly dark portrait of the suburbs in his earlier blockbusters. What then can we takeaway from these intimations?
Since the early 1980s, there has been a (slight) shift away from endlessly sprawling suburbs. New Urbanism, an urban planning movement that aims to recreate small town community, has taken hold in many parts of the United States, with more Modernist touches in Europe. The problem with New Urbanism is its emphasis on cheap simulacra – a community cannot be forced, it must grow organically. Nature must also be given an appropriate intermingling with the built environment. The Simi Valley in Poltergeist brushes against the Angeles Forest in the manner of a tense turf war. Somehow Central Park and Hampstead Heath have more natural harmony with their urban environments. The same situation must be present in the suburbs. Isolation easily occurs in an environment that looks the same. Individuality of architecture, on the other hand, fosters a coming together of differences. When there is harmony in a community (a lack of violence doesn’t constitute harmony), the environment will be in balance as well – everyone becomes a stakeholder. If Spielberg suggests what is to be avoided, perhaps we need to look to the great cities of the past to see what we should follow. Postmodernism implies non-linear influences of the past, but in the case of (sub)urban planning, a sustainable approach must look to the best examples. We can only hope for the best.
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